“Not today,” said Green, stretching after the hour’s sit in the car. “He’s busy.”
She laughed. “And you are not, I suppose?”
“Well, now, I have got this and that to attend to. The nicest among the chores being a visit to you.”
“Thank you. Now, I’ve had my midmorning coffee, but you can have some with pleasure.”
“There’s a bit of talking to do,” said Berger, supplying cause for Green to accept the coffee.
“In that case, come through the house. We’ll have it by the pool.”
As she sat down with them a few minutes later, Margot asked: “Now then, how can I help you?”
“First,” said Green, shovelling brown sugar into his cup, “I’d like to mention the letter you gave to Wanda yesterday.”
“Ah, yes. Can you do anything about it?”
“The answer to that is, maybe. By that I mean we’ve lifted a print from it. Not one that’s in our records, but should we ever run up against it and are able to link it to its owner, your nameless correspondent will be identified. We should then be able to stop the letters, if they haven’t already stopped of their own accord, and then leave it to the courts should you want to take it that far.”
“I don’t think Hugh would want that.” She lifted the plate sitting in the middle of the table. “Do have a piece of shortbread. It’s homemade.”
“Homemade?” asked Green. “Here? I mean, in this house?”
Margot stared at him. “Of course. Mrs. H. made it. Where do you think it came from?”
Green looked sheepish. “It’s Scottish, shortbread is, isn’t it?”
Margot, still holding the plate, looked bewildered. “It originated in Scotland, certainly.”
Green helped himself to one of the thick, chunky fingers and bit into it. “Jolly good,” he murmured.
Margot persisted. “Why the inquisition about where it came from?”
Green wiped a crumb from his mouth. “One of the things George Masters told me to ask you was whether there were any Scots at your husband’s birthday party.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Some idea he’s got. You know George socially, but not how he works. Flights of fancy, he has. His current one was sparked off by that letter you gave us yesterday. He wants to know if you had a Scot at the party.”
“You mean he thinks a Scot wrote it.”
“Presumably.”
“Hang on a moment,” said Berger. “I hadn’t heard the Chief say this.”
“He didn’t talk to you this morning, did he?”
“No. But all you told me was that the Chief would like Mrs. Carlyle to give us a guest list of that party.”
“That’s right.”
“But what’s that got to do with some letter or another?”
“Sorry, son, you don’t know about it yet. His Nibs’ little missus produced it from her handbag after you left us last night.”
“What sort of letter?”
“Anonymous. Mr. Carlyle’s been getting them. Mrs. Carlyle intercepted one and gave it to Mrs. Masters.”
“Blackmail?”
“Not exactly,” said Margot. “They accuse my husband of stealing other people’s inventions.”
“I see. They would, wouldn’t they, him being in the business he is in? Any threats?”
“Vague ones. ‘You’ll pay for it in the long run’ sort of thing.”
Berger grimaced and turned to Green. “And the Chief thinks a Scotsman wrote them?”
“Could have written them,” corrected Green.
“Why?”
“How the devil do I know?” growled Green.
Berger shrugged. “If the Chief says a Jock wrote them, then a Jock wrote them.”
Margot laughed. “It’s like that, is it? What Mr. Masters says, goes?”
“Not quite, ma’am. What Mr. Masters says is right so often that I’d not lay an old ha’penny on him being wrong.”
“I see. I knew he had a reputation, but I didn’t realise it extended to such limits.” She turned to Green. “I can let you have the list. It’s very rough. Handwritten with crossings out, with ticks for acceptors, and crosses for nontakers, among whom are Mr. Masters and his wife.”
“He was Senior Officer on duty at the Yard that night. There’s always one of his rank on every night. He loves it when he gets a traffic problem at two in the morning.”
She smiled. “I can imagine. Does he have to deal with sieges when gunmen take hostages and hole up in a building?”
“He could well be in that sort of thing at the outset, but his first job would be to call out the specialists. You know. The ones who use psychiatry to talk these characters into giving themselves up and the marksmen who surround the building. Once the thing was set up, George would retire thankfully.”
“I see.” She got to her feet. “I’ll get the list. It’s in my desk.”
As soon as she’d gone, Berger asked: “What’s going on? Are we here because of an anonymous letter or because Carla Sanders took a bath here in public?”
“I don’t know, lad.”
“Are we on two cases or one?”
“Again, I don’t know, lad. Have you got any fags on you?”
Berger produced his packet. “You don’t know, you say, but you were scared of taking a bit of shortbread and that has to be a miracle for you.”
“Only because shortbread is Scottish and His Nibs told me to ask if there’d been a Scotsman round here.” Green lit his cigarette. “Look at it this way. If His Nibs has got it into his head that a Jock was implicated in writing threatening letters I didn’t want to eat a bit of shortbread he might have brought here. And for the same reason I didn’t want to take any if His Nibs reckons a Scotsman was implicated in Sanders’ death. Get my point?”
“I certainly do. Ah, here’s Mrs. Carlyle.”
“This is it.” She handed Green a sheet of paper. “Can you make head and tail of it? My writing’s not the easiest to read.”
“Fine,” said Green, taking a quick look at the list. “Now, any Scotties here?”
“I think so. If you look down the list you’ll see a Mr. McRolfe.”
“He sounds Scottish enough.”
“Doesn’t he? But there’s another pair with a not exclusively Scottish name. Carpenter. Ian and Sylvia. I always get the impression he’s a Scot.”
“Accent?”
“Barely discernible, but he uses words like littly—a littly piece—and factor to refer to an agent. That sort of thing.”
Green put a mark beside the name. “Anybody else?”
“There’s bound to be, isn’t there? You’d never come across a fairly big group of people like that without a number of them having Scottish connections.”
“I suppose not. And all these people are friends of your husband?”
“Not all are friends, exactly. For instance, Carla Sanders wasn’t. Business acquaintances and colleagues a lot of them. Some are very close friends, of course, some near neighbours.”
“Whoever you thought it judicious to invite, in fact?”
“I think it would be fair to say that. There are business considerations to be taken into account as well as friendship when making out a list like that.”
“Understood. Now, McRolfe. Is he a friend or a business acquaintance?”
“He’s actually one of my husband’s business colleagues.”
“A director of his company?”
“Not quite. One of the youngish senior heads of department.”
“And Carpenter? You must have met him a number of times to know the little vagaries of his speech.”
“I’ve known him for about two years and have met him, I think, on three occasions, probably four.”
“So he’s just a business acquaintance of your husband?”
“Yes.”
“What is he? What does he do?”
“Do you know, I have no idea. But if he does business with my husband I would have thought he must
have engineering connections.”
“Thank you.” Green folded the paper and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket. “I think that’s it.”
“Just one question, Mr. Green.”
Green paused in the act of standing up.
“My husband doesn’t know I gave that letter to Mrs. Masters.”
“I understand that. He would take no action and you were worried so you acted on your own without telling him.”
“Quite right. But I don’t like deceiving my husband, Mr. Green.”
“I should think not, ma’am.” Green finally stood up completely. “But as with most other things there are grades of deceit. If doing a little quiet something for another’s good can be called deceit.”
“Put like that, it sounds harmless. Which leads me to my question. Would you like me to tell Hugh of your visit or not?”
“Tell him by all means if you would like to, Mrs. Carlyle. But that doesn’t mean you have to mention the letter or Scotsmen or anything like that if you don’t wish to. We came here to get the party list. You gave it to us and we nattered over a cup of coffee about friends, acquaintances, colleagues and neighbours. In general. Nothing specific about anybody.” Green grinned. “I doubt very much whether you could tell us anything very specific about any of them, could you?”
“Only about our close friends.”
“And I don’t even know which they are, do I?”
She smiled. “No.”
“Happy now, Mrs. Carlyle?”
“I think so. I don’t like worrying Hugh. I know he always seems cheerful, outwardly … ”
“A symptom of his condition, I believe?”
“That’s it. It’s superficial. He does get a bit worried underneath, you know.”
“Who wouldn’t, in his condition?” said Berger and reddened under their gaze. “I mean it can’t be all that cheerful for an active man in the prime of life to be chairbound.”
“It isn’t,” agreed Margot. “But though he gets a little worried, I don’t think there’s any clinical depression there, thank God.”
“He’s still able to work and use his mind,” said Green. “That’s what’ll keep him going.”
Tip got back to the Yard some minutes after one o’clock. Masters was not in his office so she left the small sheaf of photocopied documents on his blotter, scrawled a few words on the top sheet of his phone pad, tore it off and anchored it firmly on top of the other papers with the heavy glass ashtray. Masters, she guessed, had gone for lunch, so she then set out in search of Green and Berger. She eventually found Berger in the canteen reading a tabloid whilst eating a wedge of quiche.
“Do you mind if I join you?”
Berger glanced up from, as Tip was pleased to observe, the list of county cricket scores. “I looked for you,” he said.
“I’ve only just got back from the RSM.”
“We must have beaten you by a quarter of an hour. Are you going to get some food?”
“Get it for me, will you? A cheese and salad roll. I want to, what in polite circles is known as, wash my hands. Oh, and get me a cup of coffee, too.”
So Berger did the queuing up for Tip’s lunch. She beat him back to the table.
“What kept you?”
“You can see the rush at the counter, can’t you? And that’s thirty-five pee you owe me.”
As she gave him the money she said: “I meant what kept you down in Kent?”
“Willy P. Green was going on about some anonymous letters that Carlyle bloke has been getting lately. I’d not even heard about them, had you?”
“So that’s why you’re sounding brassed off, is it?”
“You did know about the letter the Chief got yesterday?”
“No, I didn’t. This is the first I’ve heard of it, but I’m not getting grumpy. You know the Chief. He’ll tell us everything. This afternoon, I suspect.”
“I hope so.” Berger pushed away his plate with the edging crust of the quiche still uneaten. “That stuff’s inedible,” he grumbled. “They mix the pastry with thistle plaster.”
Tip grinned. “Quite right, too. Thistle plaster is for internal use only, if I remember what my old dad used to say.”
He stared at her for a moment and then grinned. “Being a bit of a bloody pain, was I?”
“A bit.” She picked a few crumbs of cheese from her plate. “But I know how you feel about not being taken into the Chief’s confidence. However, we’ve got to be fair to him. He wouldn’t want a conference last night.”
He grinned. “Neither would we. We’d got better things to do, hadn’t we?”
“If you are asking whether I enjoyed myself walking along the river, the answer is yes, but I didn’t like that noisy pub we ended up in.”
“I was pleased to get out of it myself.”
She finished her roll and drew her coffee towards her. “Now, about the Chief doing things unbeknownst to us. Why don’t you do the same to him?”
“Like what?”
“Do you remember Carlyle saying the fairy-lights round the pool went out unexpectedly?”
“Yes.”
“Why did they?”
Berger sat back to think. “It depends, I suppose, whether the string was wired in series or parallel.”
“Don’t blind me with science,” pleaded Tip. “I’ve never been able to grasp which was which.”
Berger leaned across the table towards her. “Right,” he said. “Think of those little sets of Christmas tree lights. One type goes out if one bulb blows and then you are faced with removing each one in turn and testing every socket with a new bulb until they suddenly all come on again. The second type is better because if a bulb blows the others stay lit.”
She nodded. “That much I do know.”
“I wouldn’t think that Carlyle, being the boss of an engineering firm, would have the former type of setup for the lights round his pool.”
“He’d certainly have the more efficient sort.”
“Quite.”
“So why don’t you have a ready answer for the Chief as to how those lights went out? And more to the point, why they went out?”
“They’d be easy to put out,” said Berger thoughtfully. “If, as we think, Carlyle had a set where one bulb could blow without the rest going out, it means that there were plus and minus poles at each bulb holder. If you remove a bulb or blow it, the current continues to flow. In other words you don’t break the circuit.”
“So just removing a bulb wouldn’t plunge the place into darkness.”
“Not if that is all you did. But by taking a bulb out you expose both positive and negative poles.”
“The two little spring-loaded plungers that touch the bits of lead on the bottom of bulbs.”
“If the bulb-holder is the bayonet type, yes. But most of these strings of lights these days have screw-in bulbs.”
“I know. With one central blob of lead at the bottom.”
“That’s right. That’s usually the positive pole. The negative one is combined in the holder itself, usually the internal brass screw bit. The screw bit on the narrow part of the bulb picks it up. So, through the business part of the bulb you get the necessary anode and cathode contacts to light the filament. With me so far?”
Tip nodded.
“Right. Now to put the whole string out, you would have to connect across positive and negative, thus short-circuiting the whole lot and thereby blowing the fuse in the plug-top.”
“How would you do it?”
“Hide behind one of the bushes carrying the light cable. Surreptitiously remove a bulb. Drop a small piece of metal into the holder so that it would touch both positive and negative. The fuse would blow immediately. While the light is out, shake out your bit of metal, reinsert the bulb, straighten the cable on the bush and do a bunk, quick, before somebody goes indoors and renews the plug fuse.”
“Bingo?”
“Bingo.”
“Then what?”
“What do you m
ean, then what?”
“What was your reason for fusing the lights in the first place?”
“There was something I wanted to do surreptitiously. So while the lights were off and everybody was gawping towards the French window, wondering what was happening and who was going to fix it, I did whatever I had to do.”
“Which was?”
“How do I know? Spray bugs on Carla Sanders?”
“Was she there by the time the lights fused?”
“Oh, lord, I can’t remember. It didn’t seem important when we asked Carlyle.”
“There you are then. Ask the Chief that.”
“You’ve got something there,” said Berger. “If the lights went off before she arrived, it had nothing to do with her. And vice versa, though not necessarily.”
“Very illuminating,” said Tip, drily. She looked at her watch. “Come on. We’d better find the DCI or he’ll be asking us if we’ve been on holiday.”
“Half past two in His Nibs’ office,” grunted Green when they had run him to earth.
“Conference?” asked Berger.
“You could say that. Got any fags, lad?”
“Only a couple. I shall want those myself before the afternoon’s out. Use your own.”
Green sighed. “If I must, I must.”
“You shouldn’t,” said Tip. “And don’t forget there’s a move afoot to stop people like you smoking in offices and other places of work.”
Green grinned. “What about people who aren’t like me? Can they go on?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” said Tip.
“Yes, I do, love. But I’m long in the tooth and old in sin. I enjoy what I do, otherwise I wouldn’t do it.”
“And what about other people?”
“Doris hasn’t hinted she’ll leave me if I don’t toe the line.” He looked shrewdly at Tip and then across at Berger. “Aye, aye! Have I uncovered some sticking point in what I might call the relationship between you two?”
Neither replied.
“That means I have,” grunted Green after a prolonged silence. “I don’t know how you are going to resolve it, but I’d advise a bit of give and take on both sides.”
“You can’t give and take with smoking,” declared Tip. “Either you do or you don’t.”
“It’s possible to give and take in attitude, though, petal. You can often achieve things by not being too rabid in forcing your opinions.” He looked at them sapiently. “And it’s no good for you to say he doesn’t love you enough to give up smoking,” indicating Berger, “or for you to say she’s trying to change you before you get hitched.”
Bitter Water Page 16
